The file impact

The idea of the file area network (Fan), a type of storage area network (San) where data management is handled at the file level, was first mooted around the middle of last year. A number of storage vendors decided to pick it up and run with it, or at least apply the Fan tag to technologies already under development.

Widely attributed to data storage analyst Brad O’Neill of the Taneja Group, the term Fan is defined as a systematic approach to organising various file-related technologies in today’s enterprises.

It is designed to give organisations an intelligent management platform that offers close control of file information based on metadata – information about the file such as how, when, and by whom it was received, created, accessed, and/or modified and formatted – and its importance to the business based on its contents.

The Fan includes a service management element that spans multiple platforms, and filters and moves content from across a wide variety of applications, devices and technologies. It also gives file level visibility to authorised client devices or individual users, which can then access and retrieve information without the assistance of the IT department.

At the core of the Fan is a file ‘namespace’, an all-encompassing file system that uses virtualisation techniques to manage the physical storage resources under its control, and organises, stores and presents the files for authorised clients.

More importantly, O’Neill found measurable return on investment through the optimisation of file content via compression and de-duplication – eliminating multiple copies of the same file – meaning less storage resources are needed.

Juergen Arnold, chairman of the European Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) says that it is too early from an organisational point of view to comment on the Fan, but says the SNIA is monitoring the current trends and technical working groups being set up in the US to see where things lead.

‘My personal feeling is that from a research and development perspective, the Fan is a great idea and I am pretty sure it will pick up at some point. But for the moment the Fan vision is driven by a few individuals that have ideas on how storage should look like in future – there is no standard or unified definition, just proprietary ideas’, he says.

Claus Egge, program director of IDC’s European storage systems research team, says the main advantage of the Fan concept is giving storage managers more control and management of data in the San, and making it easier for them to migrate information from one device or part of the network to another.

‘The problem today is that the storage system is blind to what is happening on other servers, and the operating system (OS) and file system being run is programmed to assume it owns everything. With so many different storage platforms and servers in the San maybe there should be some co-ordination that would give authority to a single file system or OS – a super file system that is in control of all the file systems rather than single servers which act as gatekeepers,’ he says.

Giving one file system control of different storage devices and other resources should allow information to be spread around much larger Sans spanning different sites and offices, without the performance limitations associated with traditional storage access, says Egge.

‘It is about masking the storage resource from the customer so that data can be stored remotely on very inexpensive storage systems. Users do not know where the information is resident, but think they are getting a great service from an on-site resource,’ he says.

Egge knows that a number of vendors are looking at ways to define Fan technology and develop products before bringing them to market. These firms include Acopia Networks and Inforstor, but also storage heavyweights.

‘Brocade and NetApp are talking about it and I would expect Cisco to respond. But it will either call it something else or re-engineer the technology to look different,’ he says.

Despite high-profile interest, it is likely to be some time before any aspect of Fan technology makes it to the standardisation table, however, at least as far as the SNIA is concerned.

‘When we think it is time for picking up one of those (Fan) trends, we will try to focus on a certain area. Then, we will see Fan in an early stage of product proposals and demonstrations, and maybe three years from now see a standard,’ says SNIA chairman Arnold.

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